Date 2: Part 4

Christian and Alan had crawled through clean and narrow tunnels that opened into a vast chamber. The walls had murals of the same design as the auditorium they had arrived at, but the chamber was circular. The murals displayed a battle between two forces. The two armies mostly used lengths of rope and rocks, though the mural was life-sized and displayed corpses with holes through their heads.

"Twelfth Battle of Avaris: 92 BC." Christian read the plaque. Alan tugged gently on the plaque and opened another small chamber.

"I wonder if this is before they were wizards." Alan examined the wall.

"No, it was after that." Ariadne had appeared out of nowhere, as Sky had earlier. She had a faint smile as she gestured at the wall. "This was a battle of sorcerers. Clever ones, too. Magic didn't change warfare the way you imagine it would in fiction."

"Oh?" Christian looked curious. "I guess that makes sense."

"Oh, Laurel mentioned a lot of ways Hollywood was inaccurate for modern weapons, so it makes sense they wouldn't depict 'magic' accurately." Alan nodded.

"There are many ways to use magic, but the order of discovery dictated the ebb and flow of this period. The magic used was the magic of change." Ariadne gestured at the wall. "Other battles had monsters grown to terrify the enemy. My grandfather was a master of his own body, and my grandmother expanded herself to become a warship. This battle pitted ordinary people, the Hyksos, against their Kemet subjects. This was late in the conflict, and much of the magic had settled into a highly efficient form of warfare. They used slings."

"Huh." Alan nodded. "My Side of the Mountain talked about that. Like, David and Goliath, right?"

"Oh, I loved that book!" Christian smiled.

"The sling is one of the cheapest weapons a human can make. All you need is rope or leather, and you can make a rock deadly. The problem was that it took a lifetime to master a sling as a weapon. Armies only used soldiers with slings when they could start the childhood training, in your history." Ariadne smiled. "Well, until the Signal let them copy the training from person to person."

"That's kind of messed up." Alan frowned. "Like, they just got all the skill for no effort?"

"You could call it cheating, yes." Ariadne looked amused. "It was a small working, changing yourself to become a skilled fighter. Armies like this were raised overnight. A village with a grudge could fight a king's army and win. The kings hated it, but it's not like they didn't use the same magic on themselves. This mural is of a hard time, before widespread necromancy."

"What were they fighting over?" Christian cut in, a strange look on her face. "These Hykos and their subjects, what was the war about?"

"The Twelfth Battle of Avaris was about the slaughter of Hyksos refugees by the Kemetian rebels, who had been retaliating for an invasion, which was a response to Kemetian treaty violations, after the Hyksos rebelled and became independent from a dysfunctional Kemetian dynasty." Ariadne sighed. "Humans fighting their greatest enemy, the humans."

"How did it end?" Alan asked. "The war, I mean."

"They made peace." Ariadne shook her head. "It was because of necromancers. They opened the way back to life. Everyone was invited."

"Everyone?" Christian's voice was small.

"Every man, woman, and child in the Stargazer timeline was resurrected. They realized that the dead could fight. If you had an enemy, and they had dead enemies, you had soldiers who would fight for you. Every soul became a debtor, a client, a ****. A few hundred **** rebellions later, most people realized that nobody could win." Ariadne paused. "It's what they got right—all the ****, the slavery, the ****, but they figured out how to live together."

Alan suddenly snapped. "What about us?"

"What do you think your people did when we arrived?" Ariadne's voice was flat. "Witches arrived and told your people they never had to die. My mother resurrected Jesus in Times Square and asked what he thought about it. Stalin, Malcolm X, and Jimmy Carter were on the short list." Ariadne let the declaration linger in the air for a moment. "Do you think it went well?"

"No," Alan admitted after a moment. "There's like, time travel or other dimensions, right? It's not like this was in History Class."

"Don't get me wrong, we were absolute cunts before contact." Ariadne laughed. "Not the same type of cunts, but totally cunts. We tried being nice, once. We got nuclear war, heroin, gacha games, and Ayn Rand novels in exchange. I'm not saying there wasn't another side to the story, but that's the short version for why the Audience hates us."

Ariadne disappeared. Christian swayed slightly in her direction, as if drawn to the absence.

"We're going to the last map." Christian was tugging Alan before he realized she was marching them back to the tunnel. "This room gives me the creeps."